Robert Winston: life in the House of Lords

Chris - More recently, you've made politics much more a prominent part of your life. You joined the House of Lords 20 years ago about then, wasn't it? What sort of difference has that made? How have you got involved there?

Robert - Well, it's been really interesting because of course I've come in at a time when Tony Blair decided, well, it was before Tony, I came in at when John Major was prime minister. But, Tony Blair came in with his idea of reforming the House of Lords. And there was a lot of talk about that. But the House of Lords reform bill as it went through, was very different by the time it had gone through. And it became increasingly obvious that reforming the House of Lords was going to be much more complicated than anybody had expected. I was making speeches, which I was proud of, that was ridiculous really, saying, looking across the other side, to the hereditary peer saying, well, of course on the other side you have all these people who are taller than us, much more handsome, better looking, you know, these are the hereditary peers you see.

Chris - They always say politics is show business rugby people, but I'm not fitting you in that category.

Robert - I mean, some of the best debaters in the House of Commons and certainly in the House of Lords have a strong theatrical process because actually what has happened now in Parliament, which is very sad, people read their speeches. So you see people with their head down over a piece of paper, they come determined to give the speech they've written, not recognizing the speech has already been read by two other people, from different benches. And actually what they need to do is be listening and responding in a different way. I think the people who are successful to some extent in actually changing legislation and making the government rethink are those who may make mistakes while they're speaking, but speak extemporary. And we have some fantastic speakers in the House of Lords, and I look at them as wonderful models. I wish I could emulate them. I mean, Igor Judge, who's on the cross benches as the leader of the Cross Benches, I mean, he gave a speech on the British Constitution at the time when the Prime Minister was creating havoc last autumn. And he spoke for three minutes. And you thought, wow. I sat there open mouthed thinking, what a privilege to be in that chamber listening to this speech.

Chris - What about science though? Is that well represented there? And are you very much a lone voice or are you in good company?

Robert - It was better. You know, when I chaired the Select Committee for Science and Technology, which was a long time ago, that first time there were a couple of Nobel Prize winners on the table, everybody around the table was a fellow of at least one of the academies, of which there were three. There were one or two lay people, very few. And the lay people had been in business doing big industrial things. So I remember very well first chairing the report on nuclear waste. And I was terrified because I knew that this was going to be a big issue. Half of us wanted to bury nuclear waste and I was suddenly taking this committee over because I was the new chairman. And I, the more I thought about it, the more I was concerned that they were gonna vote. And that's fatal. You don't vote on these sorts of issues if you're gonna have any influence.

Chris - Why not? Is that because you're voting on something you don't know enough about

Robert - On a committee, you just don't divide the committee. You want to present a unanimous report. And if you can't get complete agreement, ignore that part of the report completely. Just find other ways of fudging the issue slightly to make sure that you get the right impact for the key issues. You all agree you must go through. And it was clear that we weren't certain as a committee. The guy who'd produced this report who was the chairman of the subcommittee, was Lord Tombs. And as we got into, and I thought, this is a taut situation, so I said 'what we have to talk about this morning, I think really my lords, is what we do about burying nuclear waste. And it's very fortunate we have Lord Tombs of course, who's going to be leading on this, and I wonder if I could just pass over to him.' And of course, you know, there's a roar of laughter. And so in fact, we got a report out which in fact went through. And there are problems of course with nuclear waste and we still have issues, but it certainly left us with some kind of nuclear industry <laugh>.

Chris - When we met this morning, you showed us the vellum where Oliver Cromwell had signed the death warrant for King Charles I, and you said he craftily put himself well down the list so that he <laugh> he didn't have the spotlight shone on him as the main signatory. It sounds like you were taking a leaf out of his book, or vellum even.

Robert - Well, I was really pretty intimidated by that committee. When I sort of took over as chairman and I thought, well, I'm probably the least qualified, certainly the youngest member. I'm really, what am I doing here? You know, that all these guys, you know, have done so much. And it's wise to remember in the House of Lords particularly that whenever you are speaking, whoever you are, there's always somebody in the chamber who knows more than you do. And, you know, we had some really good people in the government, you know, we had people like Bob May who'd been president of the Royal Society and people of that kind. And of course we still have Lord Rees, but we don't have many people of that calibre in the House of Lords now.

Chris - And do you think that's making a difference?

Robert - Well, of course the appointments are made politically and they're made for all sorts of reasons. I mean one of the big problems at the House of Lords is actually, if you're going to have an unelected chamber, you've got to make certain, you are appointing people who are going to do what is needed. And if you are expecting an expert chamber to give expert advice, you need to have experts, whether you like experts giving you stuff you want to hear or not.

Chris - Are you saying this, I mean, are you making a noise about this? Because it strikes me that we've just come off the back of a pandemic. We've got really important things going on on the international stage, ai, other sorts of intelligence and machine learning. We've got things like advanced genetics and embryo manipulation. We've touched on that, but also three parent embryos and so on, which is now going into clinical practice. There are really very important lifelong impacting decisions being made at the moment. It strikes me as quite frankly, daft that we don't have a stronger scientific representation in the decision makers.

Robert - Well I think you're right, but I think that also of course to, in my, just in my own defence, I would say at least the legislation we've got on embryo research and, and, and the and all that stuff, we've had really good debates and I think actually we got together very good legislation. I wasn't the only person involved in doing that. I mean, one of the people who I worked with very much in tandem from different parts of the house is Naren Patel. And so Lord Patel and I certainly, you know, were giving, we didn't rehearse our speeches together, but we knew really where we were coming from

Chris - The theatre coming in again?

Robert - You could say that, but actually I think it was very persuasive and you know, you're dealing with fairly intelligent people who can understand an ethical issue. And I think that actually works. But you do need to have a few people who had ethical judgement by that time. Of course, Baroness Warnock was really already quite elderly and really probably not really any longer as active in those sorts of debates as she might have been. And we needed new people. But of course, we've not been replacing those people. And I think that's a problem. So if you look around the Chamber now, there aren't many fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering or the Royal Society or the Academy of Medical Sciences. And of course, for all the disadvantages of having people who are obviously no doubt with certain blinkered aspects to their career, those are really important voices. And that's only just one example. There are so many people I could think of who would be better in the House of Lords than I am. And I think, it's very easy to forget that there are all sorts of people who could be appointed and it's a lottery and to be fair, to be of any use there, you have to give up quite a lot of time. You can't just walk in, give a speech and walk out again, if you're going to really influence the chamber, you've got to be present a lot of the time and get the feeling of how the house is likely to react. And that means, it might be sitting in the bar or you know, wherever, but you get the feeling about actually how this is best presented. And unfortunately, in the Commons we're never going to get that because it's, it's divided by a ridiculous thing called politics. And we've seen how destructive politics are this year, the last two years, three years. I mean, where we've had crazy political decisions which have been simply a way of somebody promoting a particular pet subject or some interest that they've had.

Chris - Would for instance not be able to decide what sex fits into that? People seem to struggle to define what a man or a woman is and what you can do to yourself to have a sex change. And whether or not that means you have a different sex or not.

Robert - It's a daft debate, isn't it? I mean, the problem of course, and I know I'm gonna antagonise a lot of people, but it's biologically obvious that you can't actually change your sex. You can change your gender, but you can't change your sex. So I don't have a problem with that. I don't mind people being transgender. Of course there are some wonderful people who are promoting transgender issues, but there's a risk, of course, of doing it in a way which might be damaging. And of course in my own clinic, I found very early on that I saw a lot of people who'd had transgender reassignment and who felt deeply damaged by the process that they had exceeded at the time, thinking that this is what they wanted to be. And now realizing that they actually were bereft and actually really depressed. Now of course they might have been in any way, there's no controlled trials, but what I think we need to be thinking about is what is the scientific basis behind that desire? What is the scientific basis behind the request not to be in any way pejorative or trying to be prejudiced. It's to try and find out actually why this is happening, what we can do to make the best use of what is needed and to help people and to encourage them to carry on or not. But I mean, to offer, things which are going to damage their puberty hormones, which, we were using IVF before they were, we know how dangerous hormones are to block puberty. When somebody hasn't really got that degree of competence really, or they may have the wonderful energy to want to change, but the competence to really understand what really might be going on and not to have proper advice. And I think what we've seen recently, which has been quite controversial, of course it's been whipped up because it's a bit like that Daily Mail thing, isn't it? The fact is that the newspapers make a profit and they may only make a profit just, and they only make a profit just because they are actually controversial. And as soon as you don't have controversial articles and you see it right through our daily news now, in fact the news is changing increasingly, unfortunately, we're becoming less ready to read.

Chris - Very deep and intense conversation. What do you do to unwind at the end of a tough day, though?

Robert - I'm doing a huge amount of music at the moment, so the Wigmore Hall is a great place to be and the more I go to the Wigmore Hall, again, I stopped doing it for a long time, the more impressed I'm with the sort of quality of music we have in London. So I put music very high on my order and it seems to me it's a shocking thing in this country that we have not supported music in primary school in the way we should because we're not sufficiently educated in a whole range of things. Music is one very good example, which I think is a hugely civilising influence. And so just being able to see these great people on stage and thank them by applauding them afterwards is very special.